It's not rubbish, it has a place but it's not for everyone.The £200 chrome book without a touch screen and massive resolution is a better device IMHO.Give one to idiot relatives who constantly infect normal PCs with crap and never hear from them again. No way to infect a chrome book.

(I appreciate that I should explain my answer, however it's Friday evening and I've had beer! The beer is protesting against using job-related knowledge outside of work... I'll probably explain my answer at some point, but you'll have to wait until there is less beer in me.)

Verified boot and pulling new stock images relies on trust mechanisms, which are increasingly coming under attack. People have already taken pops at Google to get into Gmail. I'd be very surprised if they didn't think the Android and Chrome infrastructures weren't good targets.

Also those are some of the big security features in Windows 8... so chances are that attackers are already working on ways to defeat them.

The sunny side is that those sort of attacks are incredibly sophisticated and are still very rare. And they could hit every and any major OS, application, service provider, etc, and there is nothing a consumer can do about it - so it shouldn't factor into whether to buy a product or not.